“The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle” is one of my favourite Bruce Springsteen albums although it is one of the commercially most unappreciated albums. It’s lyrics have that poetic freshness of the early Bruce, the band is in tune with the 70’s and the level of originality and raw talent is overflowing.
“The cops finally busted Madame Marie for telling fortunes better than they do” 4th of July Asbury Park (Sandy)
The album was released in September of 1973 and it was Bruce’s second studio album. Right after the debut success of “Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ”, and right before the iconic “Born To Run”, Bruce squeezed this gem, that I must admit, I discovered just in the early nineties.
Well, my adoration for Bruce was given and widely stated, but up until then I was familiar with his work after his “The River” album, and I was anxiously waiting his comeback after “The Tunnel Of Love”. Well, Bruce was working on building his family and I was upstate New York working on my Bachelor’s degree. University life is known as the ideal place for experimentation, soul searching and self-exploration. Since I was a studious person with academic goals, and I also was an advocate of athletic life, I stayed away from smoking pot and excessive drinking as part of my self-discovery phase. After all, I was doing my fair share of drinking back home in Greece, where a party is a success when the guests are on their feet and are being social, instead of being passed out and comatose.
My exploration started with music. I bought all five Springsteen albums that I was missing, and started to study them. I listened to them all the time, learning the lyrics, which I always did with all my records, and built imagery from the storyline in the songs. I always treated lyrics as poetry, and Bruce’s early work was a prime example of that, filled with stories of youth and love, descriptions of the city life, rock and roll characters, emotional confessions, sentimental decelerations of passion. But there was one album that kept falling through the cracks.
"The machinist climbs his Ferris wheel like a braid , And the fire-eater's lyin' in a pool of sweat, victim of the heat wave" Wild Billy's Circus Story
I bought all five missing albums together, one afternoon when I went to the local mall. I was excited to go back to my dorm room and listen to them. And of course, I got absorbed by the most famous ones, which I felt obligated to learn by heart. After a while, I realised that I haven’t heard the E Street Shuffle album enough. Just once or twice, while doing homework or chatting with people on the floor. I felt I needed to spend some time with it, to be fair with it. And I did.
At the beginning I was a bit underwhelmed. The sound was different from the other albums,
with all the brass horns, tambourines, congas, accordion, and organ. There were only seven tracks on the album and I only had heard two of them before. But I kept listening to it, trying to understand it, trying to make it fit with the rest of my favourite artist’s work. And it did.
I discovered the magical lyrics, the stories told about the New Jersey shore, the rock and roll dream of a girl’s love, the endless effort to break away, and the unknown street struggles of the creatures of the night. I loved them all. I couldn’t put the cd down. It became one of my favourite albums and strangely enough one of the albums I put on when I needed to do creative but organised work, which became always, since I was studying computer science. It was not just an album, but rather a parade of unique but everyday people, with Sandy, Kitty, Wild Billy, Rosalita, Spanish Johnny, Puerto Rican Jane, Fish Lady, Diamond Jackie, and the entire circus cast. Stories that take life and then disappear just in few minutes, all in one night.
"Save your notes, don’t spend them on the blues, boy."
"No, she won't take the train, she's afraid the damn tracks are gonna slow her down" New York City Serenade
If you asked me why I loved that album that much, I would not be able to give you a straight answer. The best I would do would be “because it is awesome!". What I found out was that it gave me a positive and upbeat rhythm, but at the same time it had weirdness and uniqueness, and above all it had that necessary underlying darkness that I always crave, especially in the verge of an all-nighter. I fell in love with “New York City Serenade” and later on it was starting to get associated with a cigarette break. I am listening to it right now and I am being transferred thirty years back in time, and an ocean-and-some-change around the globe, in a place and time that I lived, that now only lives in my fading brainwaves. It also lives in music, and through that music I can make the electrical connections and the emotional connections, and like a spark I fly through space and time, and suddenly, I am there.
Semi-lit room, with the portable music box playing, the books stacked on the desk, and papers with notes on the floor, no computer, no mobile phone. The shades drawn down but can see outside, the snow falling quietly in the cold night, and some occasional voices of people talking while passing through the dorm hallway. Hot coffee has been carefully prepared and the night is ready to go on. Studying, listening, thinking, being. I hardly felt the importance of being when I was there, but whatever I managed to gather was enough to carry with me for all these years. And as the years passed on and youth has come and gone, the music plays it’s special role in this masquerade we call our life. It is the magnet where we will pin our medals, our scars, our pens, our cars, our vacations, our frames, and our loves. Every song we loved is tied to a memory, an experience, it becomes an emotional and mental memento kept somewhere inside us in case of emergency.
The greatness of this album for me is that it managed to become part of my life and after that, I became part of my past and part of my story. It found a sweet corner in my soul and built its nest, sent the signals to my brain and was granted permission to live there forever. And what a great word that is: Forever.